Eight suspected members of a Serbian drug gang are in custody in Spain after patrol officers discovered a plastic-wrapped “torture chamber” inside a Costa del Sol villa where two bloodied men were held captive.
The rescue unfolded just after 1 a.m. On Sept. 5 in a picturesque coastal town, when a frantic woman dialed emergency dispatchers with a cryptic warning about her boyfriend. “My partner has gone to a house to handle some shady business and told me that if he didn’t contact me within ten minutes, I should call the police,” the unidentified girlfriend said, according to court documents obtained by El Español and translated by The Post.
Two patrol cops who responded to the villa were met with immediate chaos. “A naked man came running out the kitchen door, blood on his face and in a state of panic, shouting, ‘They’ve kidnapped me, and they’re going to kill me!'” court documents stated, per the outlet. The man, a Moroccan national identified in court papers only as Hamza, had been beaten and was fleeing for his life.
Moments later, the officers spotted two men dressed head-to-toe in black — at least one armed with a gun — burst from behind the villa’s gate and vault over the garden wall. They were quickly followed by several more suspects scattering in all directions. The patrol officers called for backup, triggering a manhunt up and down Spain’s sunny coast as additional units poured in to hunt the fleeing men.
While the pursuit continued outside, officers who remained at the villa made a second horrifying discovery. They followed the sound of a pained voice crying for help into a room that has since been described as a purpose-built “torture chamber.” The space featured plastic wrap covering the walls and floor, with a single chair positioned in the center. Nearby lay duct tape, zip ties, pliers, a hammer, and a pistol equipped with a silencer.
The second victim, a Spanish native named Miguel Ángel, was naked and bound to the chair, bleeding from his mouth, when officers cut him free.
“They were going to kill me,” Miguel Ángel told cops.
“I’ve been kidnapped and wounded…We were being held captive.”
Neither rescued man was an innocent bystander, according to anonymous investigative sources cited by El Español. “All signs point to these men being tortured as a settling of scores, for having failed to carry out a job assigned to them by the gang,” a source reportedly told the outlet. The gang in question is a Serbian criminal organization whose operations stretch roughly 300 miles from Andalusia to Spain’s Levante region. “It is a gang dedicated to trafficking cocaine and hash, whose activities also encompass other crimes such as extortion,” the source added.
The seven Serbian nationals who fled the house were eventually captured and are now behind bars, suspected of using the villa as an “operational base” for their drug-trafficking network. They face additional charges related to the torture of Hamza and Miguel Ángel inside the plastic-wrapped room. After being placed in a lockup in Málaga earlier this month, the Serbs reportedly threatened prison guards who refused to let them share cells, warning, “there will be trouble,” the outlet reported.
One of the torture victims was also taken into custody on suspicion of gang-related crime, and both rescued men have prior run-ins with police.
The entire chain of events began with that single frantic phone call from a girlfriend left waiting for a boyfriend who never checked in, setting off a police response that uncovered a level of violence rarely seen in the tourist-friendly coastal region.
The outlet reached out to the Spanish National Police Corps.